Coventina's History Thread: Otis has Up and Down Fortunes
In 1854, Otis - looking quite distinguished in a full beard and top hat - took to a platform at the Crystal Palace exposition in New York. A rope had pulled his newfangled "hoisting apparatus" high up a shaft, its side open to public view. With a flourish, he waved an ax toward the onlookers crowding the hall. Then, with a quick motion, Otis cleaved the rope with the ax. The onlookers gasped as the elevator began its downward plunge - only to suddenly stop after a three-inch fall. Elisha Otis tipped his hat and proclaimed: "All safe, gentlemen, all safe."
To ensure safety, Otis attached a wagon wheel's taut springs to the elevator ropes. "If the rope snapped," explained Smithsonian magazine, "the ends to the steel spring would flare out, forcing two large latches to lock into ratchets on either side of the platform."
Otis soon patented an elevator driven by a tiny steam engine, permitting retail stores and other small enterprises to purchase their own lifts. Despite the technical wizardry, Elisha Otis' commercial success and business sense were limited. Two years after his successful demonstration - despite a follow-up exhibit at P.T. Barnum's Traveling World's Fair - sales of Otis elevators totaled less than $14,000 a year. Even if proceeds picked up, wrote Otis' son Charles, "Father will manage in such a way as to lose it all," going "crazy over some wild fancy for the future." Five years later, in 1861, Otis died at age 49 of diphtheria, leaving his two sons a business that was $3200 in the red.
Could his sons possibly raise the fortunes of Otis Elevator?
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